


Fathers & Sons

by reddawnrumble



Category: Smallville
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-22
Updated: 2012-10-22
Packaged: 2017-11-16 20:04:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/543326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reddawnrumble/pseuds/reddawnrumble
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>- Where differences meet, there is friction. With enough friction, you can make fire. With fire, you can destroy anything. - Clark and Lex argue and Lex gets hurt. Predictably, Clark's faith in him becomes his crutch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fathers & Sons

Clark Kent was six-foot four and lanky, all strong back, strong arms bronzed by the sun, corded muscles and a heart of gold. Lex Luthor on the other hand was six feet even, stocky and surly, a swill of piss and vinegar and good intentions soured by a bad name. Neither of them looked particularly like their fathers—something they came by honestly, with Lex bald as a baked rock well before his years and Clark being the dark-haired child adopted into a fair-haired family.

            Clark did everything he could to emulate the passion, righteous attitude and morality of his adopted father. He wore it like a red jacket over a blue shirt or a pair of boots he never seemed to quite fill. Lex, on the other hand, was a colt tied to a whipping post doing everything in power to buck his reins. He hated the name he’d been branded with and he’d do anything to escape his father’s shadow.

            These were the men that made the argument, and this was the argument that made the men.

            It started with cutbacks at LexCorp, a dozen employees sent packing at the beginning of the month. There were a million excuses of subterfuge, mutiny, budget cuts and economical strikeouts to justify it, but in truth those people had just rubbed Lex wrong all along. He never bought their loyalty to him—mostly because he’d never really _bought their loyalty_ at all. They’d been paid off by his father what seemed like eons ago, so completely enamored with Lionel Luthor that they’d never really convinced Lex that their dedication lay with _him_ now.

            He didn’t care that they were men and women with families, and a hard Christmas on the way. They bothered him and they had to go.

            As usual, Clark saw right through it. Clark had a knack for seeing to the heart of the issue, which made him brutally honest and the most dangerous friend a Luthor could have. Usually Lex appreciated that, sometimes selfishly; he never failed to get a rise out of Lionel through his attachment to Clark, whom Lionel tended to see as an annoyance at best and a threat at worst. People like Clark pried without trying; they couldn’t help it, Lionel always said. Some men were too keen for their own good.

            Lex was generally one of those men, which was why it never made sense how he didn’t see Clark’s anger coming from a mile away.

            The next thing Lex knew after Clark saw those termination papers on his desk, they were knee-deep slinging punches with their words. Clark only saw the morality of it: how much those people needed financial support through times like this, and how could Lex let them go without any severance, and didn’t he _care_ that they had children to feed and no income this close to Christmas? _What if it had been Chloe’s father_?, he’d demanded. Nevermind that Gabriel Sullivan, father of their mutual and equally curious friend Chloe, had long been loyal to Lionel himself. He was another name Lex would’ve considered routing under most circumstances, but, well. Chloe was a factor.

            In contrast to Clark’s warm, candid honesty, Lex found himself lying for reasons he couldn’t even quantify to himself. He didn’t like looking too closely at his own reasons for anything these days, because it all made redemption seem so unattainable. So he lied through his perfect straight teeth and told Clark it was better for everyone involved and of _course_ he gave them severance, just under the table where Lionel couldn’t touch the trading of funds, and _what do you think, Clark, of course I’m going to take care of my employees! It’s almost Christmas, after all. I’m not the Scrooge you take me for.”_

            He didn’t expect Clark to see through all the bluster to the drowning man beneath. He didn’t expect the lies to be such a wedge, either. But then Clark snapped, _You spend so much time afraid of your father sticking his nose in your business, you can’t even see that he’s already here. He’s standing in this room. You’re not just emulating your father anymore, Lex…with all the lies, the backstabbing…you_ are _him._

            Like a curseword in a church, like refusing to genuflect at the Vatican; the silence was deafening, the sort of pregnant pause that followed an heirloom shattering on the cold stone floor.

            Clark’s expression was hurt on his friend’s behalf, as though the rash declaration had come back to rest on him, kicking out of him a fiercely apologetic, _Lex, I didn’t mean—I know you don’t—Lex!_

            But Lex had turned away. _Get out_.

            _Lex_!

Hands, callused from swordplay, slammed down to grip the edges of the desk; a tongue, fissured from wordplay, looping around the words _I said_ get out _, Clark! NOW_!

            Clark went, and Lex was all alone with the windowpanes and the crackling fire and the reflection of a face that wasn’t his to begin with. The same face reflected back to him in the black glass of his windshield, the slick leather of his driving gloves, the bullet of a silver Porsche caroming at a hundred miles an hour over unseen ice.

            It was mercy when the snow blotted out his sight and he saw nothing, not even the blood on the seats.

 

            Clark didn’t know it, but he was very much like his birth father then. A gypsy’s brew of anger and candor and compassion and hope for the very best when facing the very worst. Clark never enjoyed the moments when he saw Lex for all that he was, a good friend and a wise council but underneath that all a million rough edges, a million planes of broken glass on a deserted wasteland barren of love and nourishment. Lex fought his demons daily and sometimes they won, but Clark was rarely one to stand on the opposite side.

            He spent the whole night brewing about it while his parents tried and failed to console him. Being like Lionel was a fate Clark wouldn’t wish on anyone, and even at his darkest Lex wasn’t really like his father; mostly because Lex had the humility to try and do better, and Lionel only the pride that made things worse. Lex would never be him; but Clark had said it anyway, and it had hurt, anyway, he’d seen that much.

            Clark Kent did not deign to cause anyone any sort of agony.

            He was up before sunrise, even before the rooster’s crow roused Jonathan to start the morning chores, and Clark walked all the way to the Luthor mansion. He could’ve made it in minutes, seconds if he’d pushed himself, but the good long trek through the snow cleared his head.

            Lex’s security detail was in scattered disorder upon Clark’s arrival and did little to rearrange themselves at the presence of a visitor. It wasn’t until later, after ten minutes of wandering the halls, that Clark found someone who could tell him something.

            Lex had gone for a drive. Lex had been in a serious accident. Lex was in the hospital.

            Lex was dying.

            Clark went, _forget school_ , Clark went, _chores can wait_ , streaking like a red-blue dagger cutting a straight blizzard to Smallville Medical Center. Lionel hadn’t gotten his hands around the throats of the doctors and started to compress until they’d agree to evacuate his son to Metropolis, and Lex was still there. Tethered to countless machines, head swaddled, ribs cushioned. Shirtless, his skin a galaxy of bruises. Clark could find the constellations in them.

            He sat by Lex’s bed and put his head in his hands and thought very hard about something he didn’t come by quite as honestly from either of his fathers, and that was his own humility. If Clark was stubborn, Jonathan was purely bullheaded and he didn’t like to apologize; and though Clark didn’t know it yet, his birth father had been just as likely to sink his teeth straight to the bone of whatever he believed at the time, and hang on until his wife screamed at him or his closest friend deserted him or his planet was swallowed by the red sun, melted right out from under his feet.

            Clark wondered if they were both so inclined to be different men from their parents, him and Lex, and whether they were meant to take that journey together after all if Lex was going to die. If he was going to die, Clark thought, it was because he’d been angry enough to go driving in a gale of ice, and that only because Clark had brought the devils out to play.

            There was something very familiar to all this, though it took Clark some time to understand what it was. But it came to him all at once that Lionel had been in this very same hospital room months ago, and Clark had stood outside it while Lex went in, and came out again looking like a man who’d had the lights snuffed out from his eyes. Lionel was a forbidding man even injured, and blind now he’d been an even grater tyrant with his hawkish eyes on the world.

            But Lionel would have succumbed if Lex hadn’t been there to make quick, decisive decisions. And Lex lay now in that same frail state, his heartbeat ticking slowly away on the monitor; Clark didn’t have to be a doctor to know how badly injured his friend really was.

            How simple it would be, for Lex, for Clark, to follow in his father’s footsteps. For one to succumb and the other to hang on to his grief with both hands white to the knuckle and neither one ever admitting that the greatest force for good in their lives was their friendship with each other, which kept them honest; which, coming honestly to itself, made them both human.

            Clark gripped his friend’s hand very tightly, as an anchor for them both, and he searched Lex’s purple-splotched face, sinking his own jaws into life and hope and _I’m not letting you go that easy, Lex, I was wrong about you. See? You’re not like your dad. You don’t have peons, you’ve got friends, you have_ me _, right? Friends will come to your funeral, not kings…and not for a long, long time._

The monitor on Clark’s left, which happened to monitor sinus rhythm, gave a very sudden, hopeful lurch, and Clark squeezed the hand tighter. _Hear that, Lex? That means you know I’m here, that means you_ know _that_ I _know you’re not like Lionel. He would’ve given up, because what does he have to live for outside of power, and greed? You’ve got us, Lex, you’ve got your friends. You’ve still got me, you’re the best friend I have, and you’re not going to die. You’re stronger than your father ever will be._

_Listen to me, Lex. You’re stronger._

 

            It can sometimes take an honest man, a six-foot-four-inch anvil around your wrist to ground you when your spirit wants to soar. And who, Lex wondered vaguely, was the strong one now?

            Lex clung to life by the tips of his fingers, and broke the whipping post. Six weeks later, he was shaking the hands of employees that filed back from a long leave of absence. There was wonder in their eyes, and trust that Lionel never could’ve bought with all the money in his bank, because he’d always paid for silence and never offered a hand for true friendship.

They thanked Lex because Christmas would come late for them, three weeks too late…but it would come all the same.

            _Don’t thank me_ , was Lex’s running mantra. _Thank our mutual guardian angel_.

            Clark Kent looked on from the hood of Lex’s car, unseen by all, a private smile on his face.

            And he decided to himself that they would be their own men, after all.      

 


End file.
